What works best to master the game of money? How do we let go of the feeling of being broke and gain access to our financial independence? Would you read this post with me explaining what I learned from Tony Robbins' book called, MONEY Master the Game because the results based on the actions I took from reading this book are the biggest financially I have seen in my life?
In December 2016 when I read this book, I was spending thousands of dollars more money than I was making every month and stuck in the belief that 2017 would be a bad year financially compared to 2016 because of my Udemy ban. I was afraid I might go out of business and looked like I was about to run out of cash by March 2017. In what felt like an insane move at the time, I made the first large investment of my life in a Dash masternode for $11,000 because my friend @aarellanes was as hyped then about Dash as I am now about Steemit! $11,000 was was half of all my remaining cash which meant I would have to sell it in two months if things did not turn around in my business.
By May 2017, the Dash masternode was worth $87,000 and I sold it to buy into Steem while withdrawing $52,000 in cash to my bank account to pay taxes and have a larger reserve for bills. Today my Steemit account is worth $70,000 which makes for over $100,000 in earnings on the original $11,000 invested just over six months ago. Yes I realize that if I still had my masternode it would be worth almost $200,000 today but then we would not be here together would we? Reading Money Master The Game is where I found the courage to take control of my financial future by asking for help and having faith in the opportunities in front of me.
Would you let me tell you the whole story as it looked five months ago before the Dash masternode went way up in value because I think that might be even more powerful for use in your life? Read it below or watch the original video from youtube, which is Day 72 Happier People Podcast! 
Thank you to my friend @aarellanes for converting the transcription of the YouTube video from GoTranscript into this post for Steemit because it is much faster to read than the video and has all of the highlights in screenshots along with updates five months later!
"Money, Master the Game" By Tony Robbins
How did I end up buying Money Master The Game? I downloaded it on Audible after hearing Tony Robbins talk about it on Tim Ferris' Podcast. I make sure I pay attention to how I find out about other people's products today because I sell all kinds of products, I have books on Audible, I have courses online, I have books on Kindle, I have printed books, I have video courses on Thinkific. I pay attention to how I find other people's products today because that helps guide me on how I can best get found.
Now what really stands out to me about this book is why Tony Robbins wrote the book. For me the WHY is absolutely critical. If it's just a book about trying to make money with a book, then that's not worth reading. He wrote this book after a couple of different things in his life. When he was little he was broke and a man showed up at his door on a holiday, I think it was Thanksgiving and gave his family a complete dinner to eat and that just proved to him that there was good in the world! The world wasn't full of greedy, nasty people, but there were also nice, really helpful, loving people in the world.
Then for Tony Robbins personally, he has all these companies, he's written books, he goes and does all these events all over the place and then he realized, after the stock market crashed and everything happened and the recession, he realized that even his employees he didn't have their retirements set up in a good way.He had them in a bunch of high-cost mutual funds and he wanted to learn! "Okay, what can I do to help the people that are working for me the best? What is it that the people who make the most money, the billionaires on wall street, the big time investors, what is it they know and what is it they do that the average person could apply?"
He was motivated to write a book that would really help people with money, especially when it comes to planning and retirement. According to his data, one of the big takeaways from the book, 96% of mutual funds fail to even keep pace with the market! Not only on top of that, but they have fees and basically a huge part of the American public and other countries where this is going on the companies that have your mutual funds are basically sucking your retirement dry. They may be taking as much as 70% or 80% of your entire retirement. They're taking that in sneaky, discreet fees.
Retirement game plan
What I've done is as a result of listening to the book, I made my first serious investment. I got a Dash Masternode. This investment cost about $10,000 at the time. I bought 1,000 Dash and it paid me out one or two Dash every week or so and at the time I got lucky the price of the Dash went up 800% since I bought it. What was great was that I was getting Dash every single week at around 10% interest a year, plus if the currency goes up I've got a great opportunity. In the end I sold my master node at about 870% profit within five months of the investment.
This book motivated me to take some action! It showed some of the ways that the very best billionaires, the top moneymakers in the world, showed their mindset. It showed their way of thinking. I'm going to highlight some of these rights here for you. I encourage you if you get excited about this if you like it go and get the book. I got the book because after listening to Tim Ferris' podcast and hearing why what I just explained to you, I realized that this was a book that would help me. I have all this debt; my family, we have all this debt, so saving for retirement and thinking about investing has not been something on my mind. The problem with doing that is you are a consumer and a customer all the time and when you think like a consumer and a customer you spend money like a consumer and a customer all the time. When you think like an investor, you start thinking more, "What can my money do to make more money? What can I do to radically change the financial situation in my life today?" As a product of reading this book, I discovered I had a devastating financial belief that I was operating on.
One of the things Tony Robbins does is he takes the time to walk you through the motivational, inspirational parts surrounding money because these often are much more important than the details. It doesn't matter if you know exactly how to balance your portfolio and do a certain recipe or what to invest in, you're big beliefs about money are often much more important than the actual things you're doing with your money.
If you change your beliefs the things you do with money will immediately change around that. If you don't change your beliefs whatever you try and do with money you'll end up back in the same spot where you started. That's what's happened with me a lot of my life. I've acted like a consumer and whenever I've got more money I've spent more money. I haven't taken the opportunity to invest. Right now I've got about $16,000 in a retirement account that I put in and I have about $2,500. I have a TDA Meritrade account, I've bought a few stocks. Now that's a fairly normal thing people do investing. You get and buy stocks. The problem is individual stocks are very unpredictable. You don't know ahead of time which company is going to have a crisis, which company is going to do really well. You can't just time the market right. The best strategy tends to be is to have a diverse portfolio!
If you believe deep down that money is evil it doesn't matter if you have a diverse portfolio, you're not going to get any joy and happiness out of having a portfolio. I discovered as a part of reading this book an amazing, devastating belief I had on my finances. I realized, as Tony Robbins asked me to look in and look at my beliefs about money, I realized that after I got banned from Udemy in 2016, I believed that in 2017 I would make less money than I did in 2016. Imagine how insane that belief is. Why would I believe a disempowering thing like that? I believed this having no data about 2017. I believed this after seeing a miracle in my business.
Is Turning Your Finances Around Possible?
I was nearly bankrupt and my business nearly went under in 2014. I had borrowed all the money I could get on my credit cards. I was more than a $100,000 in debt than I am in right now. From the beginning of 2015 to the beginning of 2017, I have paid off more than $100,000 in credit card debts, and personal loans collectively, plus I've been making better, deeper payments on my student loans. I bought a car and got a car payment, as a typical consumer would do as well. I've paid down a ton of money in an amazingly short amount of time. Why would I impose a limiting financial belief on myself that because I got banned from where I was making 95% of my money, why would I believe that that would mean I would make less money?In 2016 so far on my taxes it looks like I have been about $240,000 in profit. I only have made $40,000 more than that in 2015. The year before I made seventy-something thousand profit in my business. Why would I believe that I would have to go down in 2017?
Lots of us don't consciously choose the beliefs on a day-to-day basis we're operating on when it comes to money. It's incredibly important if you are operating on disempowering beliefs about money that you figure out what those are and then consciously decide, "Do I want to believe that money is evil deep down?"
Is Money Really Evil?
Often these are beliefs we've got from our parents. My dad used to do these government speeches and how they controlling you with money and he'd get drunk and rip up all the money and throw it all over the bar. He'd rip thousands of dollars up and people go crazy. He believed that money was this evil thing used to control you and in many ways it certainly is. However, I choose to believe that money is a game. It's a part of the game and the dance of life. Money is a fun game to play and I look at the game of money is one is how much can I get my time to be worth per hour? My time is worth about $200 an hour right now.
I think I can get my time over $1,000 an hour. Give me a decade and my time will be worth somewhere between a $1,000 and $10,000 an hour. That's the fun of the game of life.
When you play money as a game, it's not something evil and disgusting because if it's something evil and disgusting, it needs to be minimized, it needs to be covered up in shame, it needs to be not looked at. Money makes a lot of odd people uncomfortable just talking about it. I almost never talk with my friends about exactly how much money they're making and how family members often get uncomfortable whenever the exact amounts of money are mentioned.On some deep level a lot of us believe, that how good you are or how well off you are, how successful you are, is determined by the amount of money you make. That's simply not true. You can make a ton of money and in my mind that is completely unsuccessful.
To me here's what a successful person does. A successful person gets out of bed and is grateful to be alive. A successful person loves the people in their life. A successful person can be depended on in a crisis. A successful person is sensitive, vulnerable, caring, compassionate. A successful person takes good care of them self. A successful person has good views about life. A successful person is the exact what I'm trying to be each day.
What A Successful Person?
A successful person is one spiritually grounded connected and loving others. A successful person goes through the day without poisoning their body, poisoning earth and poisoning their life. A successful person goes about the day making life better for everyone around him or her. A successful person goes to bed in gratitude that they got another day to live. That's a successful person to me. Did I mention money anywhere in there? No. To me separating that idea of money and success is important, at least in my own beliefs. To realize that no amount of money will add anything to my success and that no amount of money will make me a better person.
Therefore, money is just a game for me to play, that's part of the bigger dance of life. This was one of the most helpful parts of Tony Robbins's book, is on Audible if you buy the audio version, which I highly recommend. I listen to this whole book on audio. I am reading another one of Tony Robbins's books in print. This was a really good one to listen to, because he narrates the first and the last chapter of the book. It's really nice, because he narrates the first chapter and then his voice carries throughout the rest of the narration. Now, what is another really helpful thing I learned in Money, Master The Game? I learned that you've got to take action to make a difference!
Does Little Action Make A Big Impact?
It doesn't matter if you know that for example Vanguard is one of the best places that were uncovered in the book to put your mutual funds. Vanguard, as far as I understood, is a not for profit, therefore they have incredibly low fees. Even a 1% fee is a massive difference in your retirement. Vanguard is where I set up my new IRAs. I've got a Roth IRA there, and I have a Roth solo, and a Roth or a non Roth IRA. I set up there as a result of reading this book. I also invested money in a Master Node. I was just fooling around, messing around, trading with all these online currencies. I pulled all that money together and put it in a MasterNode. I put it in one thing that actually essentially pays me dividends on a weekly basis and allows me to be a part of a community. I took money I was essentially wasting my time with and not doing any good with and put it into something that can do the most good and give me the biggest return also. I did some pretty big things as a result of listening to this book. I put $2,500 into my Roth IRA to get that started and the investment in the Master Node was about $10,000. I got lucky, because it costs about $14,000 for you to buy a Master Node (in January 2017). Now, the price went up almost as soon as I bought it and I might have been $11,000 or $12,000, I bought some of it a little bit higher at the end.I took some pretty big actions and this is at a time in my life where I've got big debt payments every month. I'm looking at my income over the last few years and I think very likely my income is at the lowest right now, it will be for the next 20, 30, 40 maybe even 50 years or until I die. I think this may be the very least amount of money I make and right now I'm making between $5,000 and $10,000 a month profit in my business. I think as I've made this transition away from Udemy this is likely to be one of the lowest points in my income in a long time. I got motivated to look into ways to get my student loans refinanced, to pay my debt down faster, to make extra debt payments and to prioritize the money I'm spending correctly. I've started cutting all kinds of things in my life that I was spending money on, $100 a month on cable, $100 a month on e-mail marketing.
Take Action!
This book motivated me to take some serous action and to learn from the top investors. What is one of the things I've learned from one of the top investors? One of the investors really stuck with me. He said, "You make your own opportunities." I bought this dash Master Node and I'm making my own opportunity with it.I bought it and now I essentially will continue to promote it as an investment. What is one of the top investment guys do? He buys one of the things he did, that was a big hit; he bought a whole bunch of Apple stock. What does he do then? Tweet and says that he thinks Apple stock is undervalued. Right after, he just bought a bunch of it, guess what, everyone else goes and buys a bunch of Apple stock, he sells it once it's been back up because, well, it's not undervalued anymore. Now, that he said he thought it was undervalued after he bought a bunch of it, he started a buying trend as soon as it goes up, then he sells it all out makes his money out of it.
No one is better than anyone else!
The best people in the game play money like a game. It's not something disgusting, it's not something shameful, and it’s not bad to have money. There's nothing wrong with having money in your bank account. It doesn't make you a better person than anyone else to have the money; it's just a game. The one thing I've taught the people who are investors, who do really well, they don't assume they're smarter than everyone else. That is one of the biggest places that ordinary people get in trouble. You think, I think, I'm smarter than everyone else. This is a great example; I gave with Facebook ads targeting the other day.I think I'm smarter than everyone else. I go pick these entire categories well guess what, everyone else thinks they're smarter than everyone else too and what do we do, we all pick the same things. In stock and investment terms this means most of us think we're smarter than other people, and because we think we're smarter than other people, we don't learn and we just play the game as if we're smarter than other people. What do we do, we buy when things are high and we sell when they're low. I've done that exact thing with Bitcoin. I bought Bitcoin when it was higher and then I ended up selling it off, as it got lower.I bought a bunch of it when it was lower but I was too scared to hold on to it and I sold it when it hardly even went up at all. If I'd held on all that Bitcoin, I would have made a lot of money, maybe fifty plus thousand dollars if I'd held on all that Bitcoin and sold it now. The point is the people who are at the top of the game don't go into things thinking they know better than everyone else.
What does the average investor do?
Just like what I've done. I think I'm smarter than everyone else. I'm going to go in and buy some Google stock now or Wal-Mart or Apple or I'm going to go buy some Bitcoin right now and you just wander in without a plan, you get emotionally involved in, it just like I did buying Bitcoin.When people get scared, you get scared and you sell, and then you think you're smarter but when you look at the evidence you're playing the game. Most people are getting completely ripped off when they're playing the game. When you look at or you think well, I'm smart, I'm going to put my money with other smart people who are going to do things with it. 96% of mutual funds according to Tony Robbins's book didn't even match the market. If you just bet the entire market and you picked a Vanguard fund that had just an index fund of the whole market, 96% of the time over any extended period of time you're going to come out way ahead of any mutual fund.In fact the mutual funds according to the book are actively deceiving. They do 10 or 15 different studies; they take whatever one does the absolute best. Now just on dumb luck, if you pick a whole bunch of stocks, if you and me and a thousand other people just go pick a bunch of stocks, just dumb luck. One of us will have a really good portfolio. The mutual fund then grabs that portfolio features that portfolio and just essentially puts all the rest in the trash. The example they provided a customer then is one of the very best out of a whole bunch that they've tested. You would need to be able to handle and deal with your own money, is what I learned out of this book. I need to be able to be smart about the unique investment opportunities available to me today, such as buying into some dash getting a master node. That's the unique thing I'm aware of and I went through and did and not-- To take some safe options too, I bought my $2500 and a Vanguard, worth solo 401K. I just put it in there for a US-- I put it in a balanced stock and bonds portfolio and then I'm planning to put some more in a none Roth IRR 401k. I'm planning to put some into a Treasury Inflation Protected Security or TIPS.Make some conservative investments. I have a few individual stocks that I bought and then I'm holding those stocks indefinitely. I don't have any plans to sell them because you have to pay tax every time you sell something. Warren Buffet's strategy in the simple form is to buy something and just hold it forever because you only need to then pay tax once you've sold it.
If I just buy and hold this Dash Master Node forever, for maybe like 20 years it might be worth $100,000 or $1,000,000. I don't have to pay any tax until I sell it and if you're buying and selling all the time you're paying tax all the time and if you're paying tax all the time, you're losing a tone of your money all the time. These are the key things I've learned out of Money Master the Game, you can see I just love this book, I'm so hyped for it, it was really helpful. It was real long. That's why I've tried to summarize it for you in about 20 minutes here on this episode of Happier People Podcast today.My exercise for today is to continue to look at my beliefs today as they regard money. Look at the things I believe about money and see if those were beliefs I would consciously choose, enhance those where possible and learn from the things I believe that are not optimal and turn those around. Thank you very much for listening to this, or watching this. Would you please leave a like on this video and a comment especially, or subscribe if you haven't already. Let me know if you like this format I'll go through and do lots of the other books I've read just like this because then you know some of the reference, some of the source materials I'm using for a lot of the other things I'm doing.
Thank you, I hope you have a magnificent day today and I appreciate each minute you've given generously here to be with me today. Would you vote this post up because then I will keep making more posts like this here?
Love,
Jerry Banfield